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Product Description
Product Description
Muriel Spark in the autobiography traces how one of the great modern writers in English emerged. Beginning with luminous evocations of a 1920s childhood in Edinburgh and memories of school, taught by the original Miss Jean Brodie, Spark recalls her formative years, up to the publication of her first novel in 1957. In order to write about life as I intended to do, I felt I had first to live, Spark says. In her account of her unhappy marriage in colonial Africa, her return to wartime London on a troop ship, working at the Foreign Office as one of the girls of slender means , editing Poetry Review and her conversion to Catholicism, Muriel Spark outlines the life that provided material for some of the best-loved novels of the twentieth century.
About the Author
Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh in 1918. After some years living in Africa, she returned to England, where she edited Poetry Review from 1947 to 1949 and published her first volume of poems, The Fanfarlo, in 1952. She eventually made her home in Italy. Her many novels include Memento Mori (1959), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), The Abbess of Crewe (1974), A Far Cry from Kensington (1988) and The Finishing School (2004). Her short stories were collected in 1967, 1985 and 2001, and her Collected Poems appeared in 1967. Dame Muriel was made Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres (France) in 1996 and awarded her DBE in 1993. She died in Italy on 13th April 2006, at the age of 88.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
In an age when mediocraties are eulogised by the media it is wonderful to have a reminder of what a real talent looks like.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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1 review
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Mrs. Spark Has Her Fun with Us
2 Feb 2010
Format:Paperback
(This refers to the original paperback edition published in England.)
I first read this book some years ago and picked it off the shelf again recently when I was desperate for something to read on a journey. It wasn't at all what I remembered. The first half of the autobiography is cool, almost affectless. The author seems to be slightly bored with the first part of her life, laying down the vital facts with the air of someone who has had to consult old daybooks and letters to find out what happened. Even her recollections of the teacher who inspired Miss Jean Brodie come across as perfunctory.
It is only with her marriage to "S.O.S.," her husband Mr. Spark, that the tale takes wing. Now we are finally in Muriel Spark territory, where every other person is mad or obsessive, and nothing is what it originally seems. Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Oswald Spark move to Rhodesia, where Mr. Spark is quickly revealed as a hopeless manic-depressive. There is a child, Robin, but he is quickly posted off to Spark's parents in Edinburgh, while Mr. Spark enters the services and is hospitalized as a madman. Muriel stays in Southern Africa till the last years of WW2, then lands in London, where she stays in a Kensington boarding house for 'girls of slender means' and quickly lands a plum job with the intelligence services. According to Spark, she got this job because she happened to be carrying a volume by Ivy Compton-Burnett.
Post-war, Spark found employment with a high-toned jewelers' magazine, then edited something called "Poetry Review," a wretched little rag that published poetry by amateurs who accompanied their submissions with cheques for twenty-five pounds, made out personally to the editor. The petty conspiracies of this little episode were later embellished into the novel, "Loitering with Intent." Then Spark set herself up as a freelance writer, teamed with yet another marginal weirdo by the name of Derek Stanford, and lived the bed-sit life for another decade, till her stories and novels lifted her into the outer energy-shell of literary fame. This memoir ends in the late 1950s, by which time Spark has attained fame as a rising young novelist (nearly 40), a Catholic convert, and favored pet of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.
No doubt about it: Muriel Spark put her art into her fiction, and didn't have much left over for her autobiography. Reading this for a second time, I was impressed by the flatness of so much of the prose, and her incapacity for personal revelation. But was it really an incapacity, or just a refusal to indulge in creativity through a literary form she doesn't much enjoy? She twice refers to a revealing quote from John Masefield, something on the order of, "to an artist, all experience is useful." Useful, that is, in art.
But if you're not going for art, and simply relating the raw vitals of your life--with occasional asides about how this or that experience was the background for this or that novel--can you produce an autobiography on the same level as your novels? Obviously not. And for Muriel Spark, a professional and dedicated novelist to her fingertips, any notion of a revealing autobiography must have been preposterious.
I first read this book some years ago and picked it off the shelf again recently when I was desperate for something to read on a journey. It wasn't at all what I remembered. The first half of the autobiography is cool, almost affectless. The author seems to be slightly bored with the first part of her life, laying down the vital facts with the air of someone who has had to consult old daybooks and letters to find out what happened. Even her recollections of the teacher who inspired Miss Jean Brodie come across as perfunctory.
It is only with her marriage to "S.O.S.," her husband Mr. Spark, that the tale takes wing. Now we are finally in Muriel Spark territory, where every other person is mad or obsessive, and nothing is what it originally seems. Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Oswald Spark move to Rhodesia, where Mr. Spark is quickly revealed as a hopeless manic-depressive. There is a child, Robin, but he is quickly posted off to Spark's parents in Edinburgh, while Mr. Spark enters the services and is hospitalized as a madman. Muriel stays in Southern Africa till the last years of WW2, then lands in London, where she stays in a Kensington boarding house for 'girls of slender means' and quickly lands a plum job with the intelligence services. According to Spark, she got this job because she happened to be carrying a volume by Ivy Compton-Burnett.
Post-war, Spark found employment with a high-toned jewelers' magazine, then edited something called "Poetry Review," a wretched little rag that published poetry by amateurs who accompanied their submissions with cheques for twenty-five pounds, made out personally to the editor. The petty conspiracies of this little episode were later embellished into the novel, "Loitering with Intent." Then Spark set herself up as a freelance writer, teamed with yet another marginal weirdo by the name of Derek Stanford, and lived the bed-sit life for another decade, till her stories and novels lifted her into the outer energy-shell of literary fame. This memoir ends in the late 1950s, by which time Spark has attained fame as a rising young novelist (nearly 40), a Catholic convert, and favored pet of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.
No doubt about it: Muriel Spark put her art into her fiction, and didn't have much left over for her autobiography. Reading this for a second time, I was impressed by the flatness of so much of the prose, and her incapacity for personal revelation. But was it really an incapacity, or just a refusal to indulge in creativity through a literary form she doesn't much enjoy? She twice refers to a revealing quote from John Masefield, something on the order of, "to an artist, all experience is useful." Useful, that is, in art.
But if you're not going for art, and simply relating the raw vitals of your life--with occasional asides about how this or that experience was the background for this or that novel--can you produce an autobiography on the same level as your novels? Obviously not. And for Muriel Spark, a professional and dedicated novelist to her fingertips, any notion of a revealing autobiography must have been preposterious.
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